Captain Battle: Legacy War 2013
Continuing on in my quest to watch all of the 2013 releases I can get my hands on, and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to what I would easily call the worst superhero film of 2013, and I’m not talking about Iron Man or Man of Steel like some people might claim. No, I’m talking about an actually bad movie. This movie looks worse than most fan films I’ve covered on this site. The special effects look like they were done on a trial version of After Effects, with page wipes straight out of Windows Movie Maker, and make up that looks like it was done with magic markers. The movie attempts a story that’s much too big for the special effects or acting abilities of those involved. And on top of that, while it is based on an actual comic book, the timing of it is a cheap rip-off of Captain America, complete with a Red Skull analogue with the aforementioned red magic marker special effects makeup. It has plenty of moments of enjoyably bad moviemaking, and a handful of T&A, but for the most part it was simply a boring mess of a movie.
I won’t go into the details of the plot too much, because it really is basically Captain America with some tweaks. Sam Battle is a hopeless soldier who gets a mortal wound, but is luckily close friends with doctor Brandon Storm who has been working on a regenerative serum one could refer to as a super soldier serum as it were. Meanwhile, there’s a busty woman calling herself the Necromancer leading a ragtag group of Nazis on a mission to revive Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler to take over the world, but they need Storm’s knowhow combined with Necromancer’s magic to bring the plan to fruition. There’s also a subplot where Sam Battle learns that his father was a crimefighting vigilante that his reporter friend referred to as Captain Battle, and for some reason Sam keeps having these flashbacks of his father that he never knew about and would have been nowhere near at the time.
I’ve watched a lot of low budget short films in my time, and the best ones know where and how to use their limited money. This film had no idea how to spend however much money it had available. It opens on a supposed action scene where Battle’s father, whose identity we don’t find out until much later, is chasing or being chased by a group of people in ski masks. He is firing his gun at them, and when I say he’s firing his gun, what I actually mean is that the actor is pointing his gun out the car window while gun flashes and bang sound effects are added in post production while the actor makes no attempt to pull the trigger or feign any sort of recoil. This is contrasted by much later in the movie where two cops are involved in a brief gunfight where they completely oversell their gun’s recoil. Battle’s car then explodes via a cheaply overlaid stock fire effect before page wiping to the next scene. Not to mention when Sam Battle gains his powers, it’s shown by shifting the color palette to negative. Even the microphones are used poorly. Any time there are two people talking to each other in the same frame, one of them is loud and clear while the other is so quiet I can barely hear them. Even the fight scenes which don’t have to have a big budget to be done well are bizarrely done in slow motion. They weren’t even filmed in slow motion, they were filmed at regular speed and slowed down after the fact, giving a very stuttering and blurry version of slo mo where you can easily see how far from connecting any of the punches are. There’s also never any blood until the very end which has a close up of the body where you can clearly see the stake tucked under the victim’s arm like you would if you were making a film at nine years old.
The “Necromancer”, and her cleavage which is the real star of this show.
What they did spend their money on, apparently was busty women. And yet, even that isn’t done all that well. There’s one stripper scene fairly early on, which is even more poorly edited than the stripper scene that opens Barb Wire, which I didn’t even think was possible. Aside from that, the Necromancer herself shows off her well defined cleavage in every scene she is in. I will say that as far as acting goes, she delivers her lines as well as can be expected, although that’s pretty much all she, or anyone else in this movie does: deliver their lines. The default emotion for anyone in this movie is no emotion, and even when someone is supposedly getting mad, all they do is yell their lines before going straight back to normal. The Necromancer’s “army” of Nazis consists of three sort of buff guys that honestly look way too friendly and nice to be thought of as Nazis, even with their magic marker Swaztika tattoos.
A cover from the original, now public domain, comic book.
The plot makes no sense, there’s flashbacks to Battle’s father even though there’s never any resolution, besides the fact that his father is never even in the costume that his reporter friend claimed he wore all the time. There’s plenty of talk about raising Adolf Hitler even though his newly resurrected body disappears at the end without ever making an appearance. It feels like it’s set up for a sequel, but that just leaves this movie feeling incomplete and pointless. They never even explain what the subtitle “Legacy War” has to do with anything. There’s very little to enjoy here outside of watching something professionally made, released independently on home video, with such a poor level of production value. I don’t know what else to say. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
